


Mirage

by pprfaith



Category: Fast and the Furious Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, But Han Helps, Childhood, Depression, Desert, Fantastic Racism, Happy Ending, He doesn't cope well, Healing, How Do I Tag, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, LITERALLY, M/M, Moving On, Poor Brian, Post first movie, Shifters, They're Both Cool Cats, animal forms, safe houses, this is a mess, wandering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-27 00:24:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15012653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Brian grows up as the lone shifter in a shitass backwards junkyard of a town and he hates it.(My working summary for this wasBrian is a feline drama lama and Han makes it better, but with more angst.)





	Mirage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FeelingsDusk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeelingsDusk/gifts).



> Written for Dusk, who was having a worse-than-usual week and needed some cheering. And since the most productive thing I did today was make a baby laugh and eat my weight in pasta, I figured I might as well post this.

+

Brian grows up as the lone shifter in a shitass backwards junkyard of a town and he hates it. 

The smells are always too harsh, the noises too loud and people spit at his feet as he walks past, calling him fur scum and other, less polite terms even as his shadow cringes back from their harsh words, trying to lie flat and still and invisible. 

The diner out by the supermarket won’t serve him and there’s these kids at school (when he bothers to go) that delight in shoving his head into toilets and cracking jokes about drowned cats. He fights back, always, and gets punished for every claw mark, while his own bruises are overlooked without fail. 

The Christian folks tell him he’s going to hell, but Brian, all of thirteen years old, thinks that maybe he’s already there. 

He hides a lot, tries to stay at home whenever he can. But his mom’s human and his dad, the deadbeat, is where Brian gets his skin from. Sometimes she can’t even look at him, because she sees his dad and after he starts changing… well. All her boyfriends are human. 

None of them like her two-faced, bastard son very much. His smart mouth doesn’t help, although he stopped trying to curb it years ago because they’ll whale on him anyway, whether he gives them cheek or not. So why not get his licks in while he can?

The first crew he runs with (friends, family, pack, yes, pleaseplease _please_ ) goad him into changing and then put a collar on him, so tight that he’d strangle himself if he tried changing back. It’s black leather studded with silver spikes turned inward and it burns. They attach it to a chain and drive that into the ground, leashing him like a junk yard dog. Then they sit just out of his radius and crack beer cans. They laugh as he rages.

It takes him a week to work the fucking thing off and change back and he can do nothing but snarl and run because a bunch of humans, putting a spiked collar on a fur? Well, that’s just fun. But a fur biting a human, even in self-defense? That’s a crime. (His teachers taught that lesson, at least, and taught it well.)

So he hides under his mom’s trailer for three days, literally licking his wounds, and then keeps the fuck away from that part of town until he finally manages to hightail out of there at the age of sixteen.

The car is stolen, as are the hundred bucks he snuck from his mom’s purse, and the only things he carries besides that are his ID and the birth certificate with the damning little _s_ for _shapeshifter_ next to his father’s name.

+

It’s better in the city. 

There’s places, professions, whole areas of town made up of shifters. 

A lot of dangerous jobs are overflowing with shifters because they heal better, can take more damage. For that, they’re lauded. No-one spits at Brian in LA, at least not openly. Less religious nutjobs, less racist rednecks. Some people even fetishize his fur, ask him to partially change in the sack and he rolls with that for a while, until it starts creeping him out, until their adoration starts to become a fixation.

He can walk the streets without getting jostled and shoved and cursed. 

Oh, they still call him a fur, a mangy cat, an animal, sometimes, but there’s a lot of people who just don’t care, if they even realize. Another advantage of the city: no-one knows anyone and everyone’s too busy to give a fuck about anyone else. There’s safety in anonymity. 

He gets good at hiding, finds a job with an old bear, running deliveries. Lives okay, gets his GED on the side and then enrolls in the police academy as soon as he can afford to. 

Cops get respect. Hell, the Chief of Police is a canine, something big and bulky, the shadow of it, the suggestion of shape, nipping at his heels at every press conference, tall and unafraid. 

Brian wants to be able to walk through the world like that, his head held high, his shadow dancing, tail up and ears perked, instead of slinking around, animal firmly ground down, eternally chanting _human, human, human_ in his head. Tight leash. 

It gets tiring, after a while. 

So cop it is. 

+

Spoiler: it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. 

The force if thick with shifters, yeah, almost fifty percent, but Brian’s still the wrong kind, feline, not canine, sleek and fast instead of bulky and strong. Canines are loyal and steadfast, everyone knows that, just as everyone knows that felines are tricksters, thieves, antisocial egotists.

They call him kitten and pussy cat and Puss in Boots and stick him into Vice, because a cute little ass like his is just begging to go undercover as a rent boy, right? He probably likes it, goes into heat just from the thought alone. As if that kind of bullshit myth hadn’t been disproven decades ago. He goes no more into heat than they like to chew bones and piss on hydrants. Fuck them. 

Still, he takes it, because it won’t last forever and besides, Brian knows from humiliation. At least here, no-one is trying to leash him like an actual animal. And hey, some of the guys are actually okay. They let him earn their respect, treat him like one of the team instead of a leper. 

Muse’s wife is a feline, and he invites Brian over a time or two, for the moons, to keep her company while he goes running with the precinct pack. 

It’s almost nice and the regular changes let him keep a tighter leash on his animal, lets him keep it all inside, all the time, outside moons. 

There’s a new guy in Vice who still doesn’t know what Brian is after almost six months. 

If the price for that is having a few dogs snap at him in the locker rooms, and the occasional baggie of catnip smuggled into his desk for shits and giggles, he can deal with that. 

It feels like belonging, for the very first time, and Brian never realized how badly he wants that (needs that), until he has a hint of it there, among the white hats. 

+

And then: Team Toretto. 

Who sniff him out in minutes, make a few _here kitty kitty_ jokes and then just… fold him in. Dom, a huge, bulky timberwolf, grabs him by the scruff just once, shakes him a little, and then lets him go. And just like that, he’s pack. Leon and Jesse slink around him, coyotes, both, and Letty and Mia, also wolves, watch from afar. Vince is a mastiff, almost as huge as Dom, but significantly less friendly. 

Still, once alpha has okayed him, no-one dares argue. 

He’s no canine, doesn’t have pack building instincts on his animal side, but the human part? The human part all but purrs every time someone runs a hand down his arm, hugs him, or just brushes past him without expressly avoiding contact, like he’s diseased. 

Pack, pack, pack.

No-one calls him names, no-one spits at him, no-one makes him bash their damn faces in for being a racist asshole while he runs with Dom and his crew. People actually move out of his way at the races, step aside for him. Like he, Brian O’Conner, actually _is_ someone. Like he means something, is worth something. 

It feels like home should have felt like, like Rome sometimes did feel, before he called Brian a traitor fucking fur, like good things. The house is sound proved as well as it can be and there are no harsh chemicals that burn his nose, no sudden noises to startle him. 

For the first time since he was twelve goddamn years old and shifted in the middle of a fight at school, Brian relaxes.

Once or twice, he even sleeps through the night to the lazy rhythm of his heart beating out, _I belong, I belong, I belong_.  
+

But, well, we all know how that ends, don’t we?

+

He runs. Fuck his job, fuck his car, fuck his entire life. He strips down right there, by the wreck of the Charger, strips and lets loose, lets his shadow dance at his feet, lets his muscles shift, his bones grind, lets himself fall forward and into the cat.

And he runs. 

South first, in some misguided notion of finding Dom again, of making things right, but he never finds him.

Just keeps going. 

Loses himself, sometimes, in the animal mindset. 

He crosses borders without noticing and if the border patrols catch sight of him, they must not make him out as a shifter. He’s so far inside his head, it’s not really surprising that his behavior’s all animal. 

(Look at that. He’s finally become what the good folks back home always knew him to be. If he still bothered with higher brain functions, he’d laugh at that thought.)

Just keeps running.

And why not? It’s not like there’s anyone missing him, like anyone cares. He’s just a traitor, a cop, a fucking pussy, a fur, a two-faced piece of white trash even his mother couldn’t love. 

Daddy left and mommy couldn’t look at him. His ‘friends’ chained him up and watched him burn from silver poisoning, his colleagues usually treated him like the unwanted tag-along and when he finally, finally thought he’d found a place to stay (belong), he had that ripped from him, too. 

He’s fucking tired of trying.

(He’ll pick himself up eventually, the way he always does, always has done, after every fight, every loss, every humiliation, but not right now. Not yet.)

+

Eventually, human reason prevails. 

Eventually, Brian stands on two legs. 

He steals clothing and food, washes in a river, gets his bearings. Lets his shadow dance, human and cat, cat and human, lets his eyes go slitted and feral, and doesn’t care. 

Mexico. Somewhere. Down south. 

On a whim, he turns toward Baja, stolen clothes bundled up and clamped in his jaw.

Cat eyes are not made for reading the sparse signs he comes across, so it takes him awhile, but he gets there. Finds the safehouse he was never meant to know about, with only his nose to guide him. He’s shit at being human, but being cat? He’s excellent at that. 

Dom, that house sings in the night, his nose itching from it, Dom, Dom, Dom. 

It’s a large place, five bedrooms, enough for the whole pack, but there is only Dom’s smell, only traces of a single occupant, now long gone. 

He breaks in through an upstairs window and sleeps in the bed that smells most like a man who would most likely kill Brian, if he ever met him again. 

(Because Brian did his job, and did it badly, his loyalties too divided to breathe, because he gave it all up to save Vince and Dom, tried to save Jesse. He did wrong, he knows that, but he also fixed it, tried to, with a set of keys on a lonely road. 

Doesn’t matter, though. 

Nothing he does is ever good enough.)

+

He stays.

The house is big and empty and Brian has long since gotten used to hunting his food, eating it raw. He shifts between forms at will, if rarely, doesn’t bother with clothes, or washing, or language. 

There is a small town close by. He dares the fringes occasionally, gets scraps thrown his way for his troubles, or words that sound like prayers. No fear scent curdles the air here, no hate or revulsion. At the center of town, next to a neon colored Madonna with Child, an equally gaudy, holy shrine is set up. At its heart is a panther bust, its neck heavy with rotting flower chains. 

(All this time, Brian was running in the wrong direction.)

Dom doesn’t come back to Baja. 

+

Instead, someone else does. 

Male and young and healthy and furred and feline. 

He drives up in a car that sounds like all the good memories Brian has left of LA, circles the house twice on foot and then lets himself in. With a key. 

Brian slinks into the shadows, knowing full well it’s not enough to hide from another cat, and crouches low. 

Watches. 

Jeans, t-shirt, Asian features, Rolex (stolen), faint smell of tobacco and junk food. He moves slowly but not aimlessly, upstairs into the master bedroom. Takes in the bed, fur on shredded sheets, the stink of a months old animal den, for a long moment. 

Then turns toward the safe in the closet and punches in the right digits on the first try. Retrieves an envelope, folds it, sticks it in his pocket. 

Closes the safe on whatever else is still in there and slowly turns. 

Brian, sitting just beyond the open bathroom door, doesn’t bother trying to hide, just cocks his head. Waits. 

“The owner of this place sent me to fetch that,” the man says, voice smooth. Calm. Brian likes that. He crosses his paws in front of him, one in front of the other, a silent signal that he’s content, for now. Not going to attack. 

The other shifter cracks a crooked smile. “You been here long?”

Stupid question. Anyone with a nose can smell that it’s been months. Brian licks his chops disinterestedly. Another chuckle.

“Dude, that is not healthy.” He turns toward the ruined bed. “And Dom is so not gonna like that.”

Brian can’t help it. At the sound of that name, a whine escapes, low and hurt, and he hunches into himself, belly low to the ground. Canine behavior, learned behavior. The man’s eyes sharpen in sudden comprehension, but he doesn’t say anything. 

Just nods. 

He skirts the bathroom where Brian is hunkered down, takes the stairs two at a time. He locks the door behind himself as he leaves and takes his car back into the night. 

+

Brian lies awake for a long time, that night, thinking of the man and how the smell of Dom clung to him, faintly, how no-one ever mentioned another cat to him, so the guy must be new. He’s been replaced, he thinks, until he realizes how ridiculous that sounds. He was never part of them long enough to leave an empty space in his wake. 

(Never really belonged at all.)

+

The other cat is back two weeks later. 

And he brings steak. 

A whole bag of it, raw and bloody and fresh, wrapped in butcher’s paper. He undoes the plastic, leaves the open package on the porch floorboards, and sits on the hood of his car, waiting. 

Brian isn’t dumb enough to take the bait, so eventually, the man starts talking.

“So, I asked Dom about any cats he might know and guess what I found out? There was one guy he ran with in LA. Cop. Narc. Looked the guy up, he disappeared the same day shit went down. Not been seen since. Lynx, Dom said. Rangy thing. He’s pretty pissed, still.” 

A shrug, fluid, too smooth. Behind him, his shadow stretches and switches, large cat soaking up the sun, entirely unafraid of who might see. Brian is ridiculously, intensely jealous of that tiny act, that lack of hesitation.

“I think Dom’s an idiot. That guy risked a lot for him. Saved his ass. Obviously put his own in a bind. That’s loyalty, even if the situation was shit.”

He sinks back onto his elbows, zeroes in on Brian’s hiding place over the rim of his sunglasses. “You gonna eat that before it spoils?”

Busted, Brian slinks forward. Might as well. 

+

His name is Han, and for some reason, he stays. 

Stays human, too. 

Cleans out Brian’s sleeping place with a grimace of disgust, airs out the house, buys food. Sleeps in another bedroom, leaves the door cracked open in an invitation Brian knows better than to accept. 

(He’s had enough offers of comfort, of pack and belonging rescinded to know better now.) 

He talks, sometimes. Easy chatter, nothing important. Occasionally, it’s about Dom. 

“I mean, the guy is cool, you know, but long term way too intense for me. I just want some sun, a fast car, a little fun. But Dom’s like…,” he doesn’t know Mia, hasn’t heard the gravity speech, so he comes up short. Shrugs. “Worked a few gigs with him and then decided to ditch. I was on my way stateside when he asked me to drop by here, mail him those papers.”

He goes back to scrambling eggs he won’t share with Brian because, “No thumbs, no eggs.”

Most of the time, it’s not Dom he talks about. The weather, his shitty Spanish, the book he’s reading, his car and all he wants to do to it, all the cool mods he’s seen at all the exotic places he’s raced in. Just random noise. 

Brian stops hunting, eats raw meat from plates left on the kitchen floor while he watches the tail of Han’s shadow move like a pendulum beneath his chair. 

+

“Man, how do you not go stir crazy with boredom out here?”

Brian flicks his tail, sniffs.

“Okay, right. But, like, unless you’ve gone completely animal, your human side has to be bored out of his skull.”

He licks his chops and gives Han a toothy grin.

The man rolls his eyes. “Great. I’m the mouse here, I can tell.”

He doesn’t smell like he minds but sometimes, every couple of days, Brian considers going two-legged just for a mouth to ask, “Why the fuck are you here?”

Never does, though.

+

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but gato viejo means old cat, right?”

Brian cracks one eye. He was napping in the sun. Han shrugs. “That’s what the locals call you. They think you’re out here to die.”

Brian lets his ears twitch, rolls to his feet only long enough to stretch, and then lies back down, head turned away this time.

“Oh,” Han says.

(He’s wrong, but he’s also right, so Brian ignores him for a few days, disappearing into the scraggly underbrush to chase mice and lizards.)

+

In the end, it’s the car, because what else would it be. 

Han’s rolled his Honda into the tricked out garage (of course Dom would hide a state-of-the-art garage in his Mexico safehouse) and is fumbling with the fuel injection. Only he’s a shit mechanic and he’s doing it wrong and all this is going to get him is an explosion, goddamnit!

Brian leaps off the highest shelf he was perched on without a second thought, shifting in midair and landing on tender human feet. It takes him to the count of twelve to catch his balance, to remember how to be bipedal. He hasn’t turned since Han arrived for the first time and before that, it had already been months.

The other cat watches, startled and silent, until Brian starts moving, shoving him sideways and grabbing his tools from slack hands. “You’re gonna get blown up like this,” he scolds, voice rough, and bends, still jay naked, to fix what Han fucked up. 

Three feet away, smelling like citrus surprise and warm pleasure, Han starts laughing. 

+

So, clothing is something you can get unused to, apparently. 

The shorts and shirt Han gives him, sly smile on his face, are uncomfortable. They chafe and hinder movement and feel just plain weird. 

So he takes them off again after an agonizing five hours and wanders around naked, still trying to settle back into a human center of gravity.

He doesn’t turn back to fur, though. 

+

“So, have you seriously gone cat ever since LA?” Han wants to know. 

They went for a drive, Han behind the wheel because he doesn’t trust Brian’s fine motor skills yet. Now they’re lying on the hood of the Honda, stargazing like a couple of idiots, a sixpack of beer between them. 

It’s been two weeks and Brian has finally gotten used to at least wearing jeans and loose shirts again. Shoes are a work in progress. He wiggles his bare toes, sand and dust crunching between them.

He shrugs.

“Why?”

“Why not?” It’s not like there was anywhere to go, or anyone to run to. He was a traitor to Dom, to the cops, to everyone he knew in LA. And home? He’s not going back there, not even in a box. He’d rather rot in a ditch than subject even his dead body to that shit ever again.

He still has the scars on his scruff from that collar, studded with silver, and he knows Han has seen them, knows he knows something of what caused them. He touches them now, subconscious tell, then grinds his teeth as soon as he realizes what he’s doing. 

Fourteen and wanting to belong. Fuck, but he was stupid. 

Han hums in lieu of an answers, leans further back against the windshield. 

He doesn’t spout any platitudes, though, so Brian lets himself go on, just a little. “Didn’t seem to matter, you know. Cat’s easier. It’s the human side that makes everything so messed-up.”

Animals don’t know species or race or who your parents are, or what you’ve done. God, he sounds pathetic. Straight-up sob story. 

“Skipped out on my mom when I was seventeen,” Han offers, eventually. “Went fur for a while, too. Didn’t change back until I discovered cars.” He grins, slyly, because they have that in common, now. 

They knock fists, sideways, elbows jamming painfully, and laugh and it shouldn’t be easy, shouldn’t be so comfortable, because besides their fur and Dom in their rearview mirror, they have nothing in common, but, but. 

Brian _likes_ Han. Truly, genuinely likes him, without compromise or fear or apprehension. 

It’s a brave new world. 

+

Dom calls after three months. 

A job, in the DR. Good payout, sick party afterwards and a giant finger to The Man while they’re at it.

Han shrugs, turns it over a few times while sorting a pile of colorful knock-off M&Ms into separate piles. He holds up a blue one questioningly. _Are there blue M &Ms_?

Brian, across the kitchen, shrugs. No idea. He’s more the salty than the sweet kind.

“Nah, man. Not this time,” Han says, eventually, cracking one of the blue ones, testing the flavor. 

“You sure?” Dom asks, voice tinny through the phone. 

“Yeah, man. I got a thing going here.” He winks at Brian. Actually winks. Cheeky fuck. 

There’s a pause. “Han, if you need help….” He trails off, starts again. “You’re family.”

He means pack. When Dom says family, he always means pack, and they both know it. Can’t feel it, though. Not how they’re wired. The human side appreciates contact, closeness, but that mythical pack bond all canines drool about? They don’t feel that. 

For them, ‘family’ is just another word. 

Dom called Brian family, too, once. 

(Maybe it’s just a word for Dom, too, in the end.)

“Thanks, Dom. But I’m fine. Just busy.”

He hangs up, studies Brian over his piles of candy. “Wanna go for a run?”

+

Han, in his other skin, is a gorgeous, sleek thing, spotted and surprisingly large. Takes up more space, somehow, than his heavier human form. Licks his chops, snaps his teeth and whips Brian in the face with his tail in clear challenge.

They run all night. 

+

Eventually, between fiddling with the junker they scored for Brian and spending their nights running on four legs and watching the scars, Brian leans over the breakfast table in a house that has long since stopped smelling like Dom, and kisses Han through a smile.

Han kisses him back. Then he steals the syrup and half of Brian’s pancakes, just because he can.

That’s sort of all there is to it. 

+

When Dom calls again a year later, they’ve both been half expecting it. They do, occasionally, watch TV, and Dom, Mia and crew flipping a goddamn prison bus and then disappearing into South America makes even Mexican news. There’s a man hunt on and everything. 

“Rio,” he says, and, “a hundred million dollars,” and, “ride or die.”

Han looks at Brian, up to his waist in the hood of his Skyline. Brian leans backwards, peers out from under the hood. His hair is getting long again, hanging in his eyes and he blows the reddish blonde strand aside. Shrugs and flings his wrench at Han.

Han catches it, nods into the phone. “Alright,” he allows. “See you soon.”

Hangs up. “Am I getting one ticket or two?”

Brian holds up one hand, two fingers extended, already back inside the Skyline. 

Han nods. 

+

The first thing Dom does when he spots Brian behind Han is growl. The second is leap. 

Brian, though, Brian isn’t trying to play human anymore, isn’t green and scared of his own shadow. This Brian isn’t the Brian Dom abandoned by the side of the road like an unwanted pet. 

(This Brian doesn’t try desperately to belong anymore, knowing full well that he never will.)

This Brian isn’t there when the bigger man lands.

Dom is strong and he is broad and he is dangerous. 

But Brian is faster. 

He shifts before Dom has fully regained his balance and when the wolf snaps half-changed jaws at him, he snarls back and gets up into the rafters before anyone else can so much as move. 

Up there, safe from everyone except Han and outright gunfire, he perches, pendulum tail teasing. Waiting. 

“Dom,” Han says, quiet and calm and sure. He always sounds so fucking sure. Brian thinks he’s the only one aware that it’s a façade half the time and he won’t tell. “He’s with me. Double or nothing, that’s the deal.”

It earns him a snarl, until Vince, Vince of all people, steps between wolf and cat. “He saved my life, Dom. Hell, he saved yours, too. And the Buster don’t look so good. I think we can call it square.”

Brian hisses, affronted. Han made him cut his hair and everything. He’s almost back to the beach boy surfer body he once had, instead of the strung out, skin-over-muscle-and-bone look he sported after four years as a cat, wandering the wilds of Mexico. 

(Goddamn, his life sounds like a sad country song.) 

Vince, to Brian’s eternal confusion, actually snorts a laugh as he buries his hand in Dom’s scruff and yanks backwards. Really, he was always the smarter of those two. 

+

Mia ignores Brian, Dom snarls a lot, and Brian just tries not to be where either of them are. The rest of the crew are strangers to Brian, so that’s fine. 

He sticks to Han, spends a lot of time out in the city, doing surveillance for the heist. Practices his driving with everyone else. 

When Vince hackles him good semi-naturedly, Dom less so, he shrugs. “Haven’t driven in a while.”

He spends more time in his fur again. Han sighs and shifts to sleep curled around him. 

The sharp chick with the high heels and the guns coos at them. She smells cold and feathery, some kind of bird of prey, and neither of them wants to find out what, exactly, she is, so they let her.

+

Hobbs makes Brian’s hackles go up with his mere presence. 

He’s Old Testament dangerous, straight to the point of having tunnel vision, with the conviction of a fanatic to go with it. He’s the kind of guy Brian would have once gone belly-up for, trying desperately to win approval.

Brian, who still feels like Dom’s after his tail, gets a little twitchy with the addition of another apex predator with Brian on his shitlist. Especially once the handcuffs come out. 

“So,” the man offers, once he has them all cuffed and shoved into a neat little line on the hard concrete floor, three men with weapons on them. “O’Conner. Popular opinion had you dead in a ditch somewhere, after Toretto ganked you.”

Brian shrugs, chewing on the itch in his gums. 

“Can’t blame them, the way you just disappeared. No car, no money, not even ID. What did you do? Just change skin and run away?”

Another shrug. 

Beside him, far too close, Dom gives him a sideways look. He smells surprised. Did he honestly think Brian walked away from that crash and back to some nice, cozy life? Really?

Hobbs laughs, booming, too loud. “Oh, you did! You actually did! Did you know, I went to your hometown after you were declared dead. Wanted to pass on the news in person.” They would give a missing cop case to Hobbs, would let him try to ferret out the traitor.

“Do you know what I found?” It’s a leading question, meant to goad. Cheap ploy. Brian read the same handbook.

Nods. “Yes.” It’s all the other man is going to get from him. He has no interest in rolling out his life’s history in front of Team Toretto.

A rotting trailer and a dead mother, burnt-out cars by the side of the highway, hatred at every street corner, blood on the pavement and no way out. 

Hobbs must see some of it in his eyes, because he nods, too, abruptly. Doesn’t ask again. 

(It might just be Brian’s imagination, but he thinks the giant of a man treats him with some measure of respect, after that.)

+

In the end, Dom quietly passes Brian a fair share of the money, even though that wasn’t the deal. Brian nods, tilts his head to the side in a single, brief instant of acknowledgement. 

Once upon a time, they were pack. Or maybe the chance of one. 

Han slings an arm over his shoulders, leads him to the car. He even lets Brian drive. 

Eventually, hours outside of Rio, headed for Baja, where their own cars still wait for them, he asks, “So?”

Brian shrugs as he take a turn too sharply, tires squealing. “Dunno,” he admits. 

He expected… something. Closure. A fall-out. Some sort of counterpoint to everything else that happened. An Ending. A sudden realization about belonging, about his endless search for some kind of home. Epiphany. Maybe he hoped he’d look at Dom and feel nothing, or look at Han and suddenly, abruptly, feel everything. 

He didn’t. Doesn’t. 

He’s a cat and cats don’t feel pack. He’s an abuse victim, a liar and a thief, a former cop and a racer and none of those get places to belong, get happy endings. 

Han shifts, leaning against the passenger side door, studies him patiently. Waiting. Like he has for months. A year now, almost. 

Always patient. Always there. For no reason Brian can figure other than that he wants to. He drops his hand from the gear stick, blindly finds a knee, squeezes. 

“I’m good,” is what he finally settles for. Because he has this, at least, has Han. It’s not settling for something less, even. It’s just… different from what he thought he wanted. 

No grand finale. Just this. Two cats, moving side by side, in sync. Han laughs, starts digging around his pockets for the ever-present candy, offers Brian first pick of the skittles he finds, slightly melted.

Brian takes a few and floors the gas pedal. 

+

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment at the door.


End file.
